Ghezirah! Riding Robin up to the cliffs where, in this

  newly clear autumn air, under grey skies and tearing wet

  wind, she could finally see the waiting fuselage of that

  3 6 8

  B R E AT H M O S S

  last golden rocket, Jalila felt confused and tiny; huge and mythic. It was agreed though, that for the sake of everyone—and not least Jalila herself, should she change her

  mind—that the word should remain that she was travel-

  ling out around the planet with Pavo on board the En-

  deavour. In need of something to do when she wasn’t brooding, and waiting for further word from (could it really be?) the sentient city of Ghezirah, Jalila threw herself into the listings and loadings and preparations with convincing enthusiasm.

  “The hardest decisions, once made, are often the best

  ones.”

  “Compared to what you’ll be doing, my little journey

  seems almost pointless.”

  “We love you so deeply.”

  Then the message finally came: an acknowledgement;

  an acceptance; a few (far too few, it seemed) particulars of the arrangements and permissions necessary for such a

  journey. All on less than half a sheet of plain two-

  dimensional printout.

  Even Lya had started touching and hugging her at

  every opportunity.

  Jalila ate lunch with Kalal and Nayra. She surprised

  herself and talked gaily at first of singing islands and

  sea-leviathans, somehow feeling she was hiding little

  from her two best friends but the particular details of the journey she was undertaking. But Jalila was struck by the coldness which seemed to lie between these two supposed

  lovers. Nayra, perhaps sensing from bitter experience that she was once again about to be rejected, seemed near-tearful behind her dazzling smiles and the flirtatious

  blonde tossings of her hair, whilst Kalal seemed . . . Jalila had no idea how he seemed, but she couldn’t let it end

  3 6 9

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  like this, and concocted some queries about the Endeavour so that she could lead him off alone as they left the bar. Nayra, perhaps fearing something else entirely, was

  reluctant to leave them.

  “I wonder what it is that we’ve both done to her?”

  Kalal sighed as they watched her give a final sideways

  wave, pause, and then turn reluctantly down a sidestreet

  with a most un-Naryan duck of her lovely head.

  They walked towards the harbour through a pause in

  the rain, where the Endeavour was waiting.

  “Lovely, isn’t she?” Kalal murmured as they stood

  looking down at the long deck, then up at the high forest of spars. Pavo, who was developing her acquaintance

  with the ship’s mind, gave them a wave from the bubble

  of the forecastle. “How long do you think your journey

  will take? You should be back by early spring, I calculate, it you get ahead of the icebergs . . .”

  Jalila fingered the brooch the tariqua had given her,

  and which she had taken to wearing at her shoulder in

  the place where she had once worn the tideflower. It was

  like black ivory, but set with tiny white specks which

  loomed at your eyes if you held it close. She had no idea what world it was from, or of the substance of which it

  was made.

  “. . . You’ll miss the winter here. But perhaps that’s no bad thing. It’s cold, and they’ll be other Seasons on the ocean. And they’ll be other winters. Well, to be honest,

  Jalila, I’d been hoping—”

  “—Look!” Jalila interrupted, suddenly sick of the lie

  she’d been living. “I’m not going.”

  They turned and were facing each other by the har-

  bour’s edge. Kalal’s strange face twisted into surprise, and then something like delight. Jalila thought he was look-3 7 0

  B R E AT H M O S S

  ing more and more like his father. “That’s marvellous!”

  He clasped each of Jalila’s arms and squeezed her hard

  enough to hurt. “It was rubbish, by the way, what I just

  said about winters here in Al Janb. They’re the most mag-

  ical, wonderful season. We’ll have snowball fights to-

  gether! And when Eid al-Fitr comes . . .”

  His voice trailed off. His hands dropped from her.

  “What is it Jalila?”

  “I’m not going with Pavo on the Endeavour, but I’m going to Ghezirah. I’m going to study under the Church

  of the Gateway. I’m going to try to become a tariqua.”

  His face twisted again. “That witch—”

  “—don’t keep calling her that! You have no idea!”

  Kalal balled his fists, and Jalila stumbled back, fearing for a moment that this wild, odd creature might actually

  be about to strike her. But he turned instead, and ran off from the harbour.

  Next morning, to no one’s particular surprise, it was once again raining. Jalila felt restless and disturbed after her incomplete exchanges with Kalal. Some time had also

  passed since the message had been received from Ghezi-

  rah, and the few small details it had given of her journey had become vast and complicated and frustrating in their

  arranging. Despite the weather, she decided to ride out to see the tariqua.

  Robin’s mood had been almost as odd as her mothers

  recently, and she moaned and snickered at Jalila when she entered the stables. Jalila called back to her, and stroked her long nose, trying to ease her agitation. It was only

  when she went to check the harnesses that she realised

  that Abu was missing. Lya was in the haramlek, still fin-

  ishing breakfast. It had to be Kalal who had taken her.

  3 7 1

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  The swirling serraplated road. The black, dripping

  trees. The agitated ocean. Robin was starting to rust

  again. She would need more of Pavo’s attention. But

  Pavo would soon be gone too . . . The whole planet was

  changing, and Jalila didn’t know what to make of any-

  thing, least of all what Kalal was up to, although the

  unasked-for borrowing of a precious mount, even if Abu

  had been virtually Kalal’s all summer, filled her with a

  foreboding which was an awkward load, not especially

  heavy, but difficult to carry or put down; awkward and

  jagged and painful. Twice, now, he had turned from her

  and walked away with something unsaid. It felt like the

  start of some prophecy . . .

  The qasr shone jet-black in the teeming rain. The stud-

  ded door, straining to overcome the swelling damp, burst

  open yet more forcefully than usual at Jalila’s third

  knock, and the air inside swirled dark and empty. No sign of Abu in the place beyond the porch where Kalal would

  probably have hobbled him, although the floor here

  seemed muddied and damp, and Robin was agitated.

  Jalila glanced back, but her and her hayawan had already

  obscured the possible signs of another’s presence. Unlike Kalal, who seemed to notice many things, she decided she

  made a poor detective.

  Cold air stuttered down the passageways. Jalila,

  chilled and watchful, had grown so used to this qasr’s

  sense of abandonment that it was impossible to tell

  whether the place was now finally empty. But she feared

  it was. Her thoughts and footsteps whispered to her that

  the tariqua, after ruining her life and playing with her

  expectations, had simply vanished into a puff of lost po-

  tentialities. Already disappointed, angry, she hurried to the high-ceilinged room set with white tiles and found to 3 7 2

  B R E AT H M O S S

  no great surprise that the strewn cushions were cold and

  damp, the coffee lamp was unlit, and that the book

  through which that patient ant had crawled was now

  sprawled in a damp-leafed scatter of torn pages. There

  was no sign of the scarab. Jalila sat down, and listened to the wind’s howl, the rain’s ticking, wondering for a long time when it was that she had lost the ability to cry.

  Finally, she stood up and moved towards the court-

  yard. It was colder today than it had ever been, and the

  rain had greyed and thickened. It gelled and dripped from the gutters in the form of something she supposed was

  called sleet, and which she decided as it splattered down her neck that she would hate forever. It filled the bowl of the fountain with mucus-like slush, and trickled sluggishly along the lines of the drains. The air was full of weepings and howlings. In the corner of the courtyard,

  there lay a small black heap.

  Sprawled half in half out of the poor shelter of the

  arched cloisters, more than ever like a flightless bird, the tariqua lay dead. Here clothes were sodden. All the fur-nace heat had gone from her body, although, on a day

  such as this, that would take no more than a matter of

  moments. Jalila glanced up though the sleet towards the

  black wet stone of the latticed mashrabiya from which

  she and Kalal had first spied on the old woman, but she

  was sure now that she was alone. People shrank incredi-

  bly when they were dead—even a figure as frail and old

  as this creature had been. And yet, Jalila found as she

  tired to move the tariqua’s remains out of the rain, their spiritless bodies grew uncompliant; heavier and stupider

  than clay. The tariqua’s face rolled up towards her. One

  side pushed in almost unrecognisably, and she saw that a

  nearby nest of ants were swarming over it, busily tun-

  3 7 3

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  nelling out the moisture and nutrition, bearing it across the smeared paving as they stored up for the long winter

  ahead.

  There was no sign of the scarab.

  5.

  This, for Jalila and her mothers, was the Season of

  Farewells. It was the Season of Departures.

  There was a small and pretty onion-domed mau-

  soleum on a headland overlooking Al Janb, and the pas-

  tures around it were a popular place for picnics and

  lover’s trysts in the Season of Summers, although they

  were scattered with tombstones. It was the ever-reliable

  Lya who saw to the bathing and shrouding of the tari-

  qua’s body, which was something Jalila could not possi-

  bly face, and to the sending out though the null-space

  between the stars of all the necessary messages. Jalila,

  who had never been witness to the processes of death be-

  fore, was astonished at the speed with which everything

  arranged. As she stood with the other mourners on a day

  scarfed with cloud beside the narrow rectangle of earth

  within which what remained of the tariqua now lay, she

  could still hear the wind booming over the empty qasr,

  feel the uncompliant weight of the old woman’s body, the

  chill speckle of sleet on her face.

  It seemed as if most of the population Al Janb had

  made the journey with the cortege up the narrow road

  from the town. Hard-handed fisherwomen. Gaudily

  dressed merchants. Even the few remaining aliens. Nayra

  was there, too, a beautiful vision of sorrow surrounded

  by her lesser black acolytes. So was Ibra. So, even, was

  3 7 4

  B R E AT H M O S S

  Kalal. Jalila, who was acknowledged to have known the

  old woman better than anyone, said a few words which

  she barely heard herself over the wind. Then a priestess

  who had flown in specially from Ras pronounced the

  usual prayers about the soul rising on the arms of

  Munkar and Nakir, the blue and the black angels. Look-

  ing down into the ground, trying hard to think of the

  Gardens of Delight which the Almighty always promised

  her stumbling faithful, Jalila could only remember that

  dream of her own burial: the soil pattering on her face,

  and everyone she knew looking down at her. The tariqua,

  in one of her many half-finished tales, had once spoken

  to her of a world upon which no sun had ever shone, but

  which was nevertheless warm and bounteous from the

  core of heat beneath its surface, and where the people

  were all blind, and moved by touch and sound alone; it

  was a joyous place, and they were forever singing. Per-

  haps, and despite all the words of the Prophet, Heaven,

  too, was a place of warmth and darkness.

  The ceremony was finished. Everyone moved away,

  each pausing to toss in a damp clod of earth, but leaving the rest of the job to be completed by a dull-minded robotic creature, which Pavo had had to rescue from the at-

  tentions of the younger children who, all though the

  long Habaran summer, had ridden around on it. Down at

  their haramlek, Jalila’s mothers had organised a small

  feast. People wandered the courtyard, and commented

  admiringly on the many changes and improvements they

  had made to the place. Amid all this, Ibra, seemed sub-

  dued—a reluctant presence in his own body, whilst Kalal

  was nowhere to be seen at all, although Jalila suspected

  that, if only for the reasons of penance, he couldn’t be

  far away.

  3 7 5

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  Of course, there had been shock at the news of the

  tariqua’s death, and Lya, who had now become the per-

  son to whom the town most often turned to resolve its

  difficulties, had taken the lead in the enquiries which followed. A committee of wisewomen was organised even

  more quickly than the funeral, and Jalila had been sum-

  moned and interrogated. Waiting outside in the cold hall-

  ways of Al Janb’s municipal buildings, she’d toyed with

  the idea of keeping Abu’s disappearance and her suspi-

  cions of Kalal out of her story, but Lya and the others had already spoken to him, and he’d admitted to what

  sounded like everything. He’d ridden to the qasr on Abu

  to remonstrate with the tariqua. He’d been angry, and his mood had been bad. Somehow, but only lightly, he’d

  pushed the old woman, and she had fallen badly. Then,

  he panicked. Kalal bore responsibility for his acts, it was true, but it was accepted that the incident was essentially an accident. Jalila, who had imagined many versions of

  Kalal’s confrontation with the tariqua, but not a single

  one which seemed entirely real, had been surprised at

  how easily the people of Al Janb were willing to absolve

  him. She wondered if they would have done so quite so

  easily if Kalal had not been a freak—a man. And then she

  also wondered, although no one had said a single word to

  suggest it, just how much she was to blame for all of this herself.

  She left the haramlek from the funeral wake and

  crossed the road to the beach. Kalal was sitting on the

  rocks, his back turned to the shore and the mountains. He didn’t look around when she approached and sat down

  beside him. It was the first time since before the tariqua’s death that they’d been alone.

  3 7 6

  B R E AT H M O S S

  “I’ll have to leave here,” he said, still gazing out to-

  wards the clouds which trailed the horizon.

  “There’s no reason—”

  “—no one’s asked me and Ibra to stay. I think they would, don’t you, if anyone had wanted us to? That’s the

  way you women work.”

  “We’re not you women, Kalal. We’re people.”

  “So you always say. And all Al Janb’s probably terri-

  fied about the report they’ve had to make to that thing

  you’re joining—the Church of the Gateway. Some big,

  powerful, body, and—whoops—we’ve killed one of your

  old employees . . .”

  “Please don’t be bitter.”

  Kalal blinked and said nothing. His cheeks were shin-

  ing.

  “You and Ibra—where will you both go?”

  “There are plenty of other towns around this coast. We

  can use our boat to take us there before the ice sets in. We can’t afford to leave the planet. But maybe in the Season of False Springs, when I’m a grown man and we’ve made

  some of the proper money we’re always talking about

  making from harvesting the tideflowers—and when word’s

  got around to everyone on this planet of what happened

  here. Maybe then we’ll leave Habara.” He shook his head

  and sniffed. “I don’t know why I bother to say maybe . . .”

  Jalila watched the waves. She wondered if this was the

  destiny of all men; to wander forever from place to place, planet to planet, pursued by the knowledge of vague

  crimes which they hadn’t really committed.

  “I suppose you want to know what happened?”

  Jalila shook her head. “It’s in the report, Kalal. I be-

  lieve what you said.”

  3 7 7

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  He wiped his face with his palms, studied their wet-

  ness. “I’m not sure I believe it myself, Jalila. The way she was, that day. That old woman—she always seemed to be

  expecting you, didn’t she? And then she seemed to know.

  I don’t understand quite how it happened, and I was an-

  gry, I admit. But she almost lunged at me . . . She seemed to want to die . . .”